A cacophony of states

Following the just-completed general election, The Economist co-sponsored a survey of the electorate by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi. The survey, of 9,069 people in 105 of the 543 parliamentary constituencies, suggests that the BJP’s nationalistic campaign had little impact. Yet the party has won over groups that used to be wary of its pro-Hindu ideology

THE world's largest democracy is also, to outsiders, the most perplexing. About 620m people are eligible to vote and well over half of them do, even though a series of unstable governments at the centre have compelled Indians to go to the polls three times in little more than three years. This vast electorate encompasses the world's largest concentrations of poverty and illiteracy. According to the CSDS survey, 29% of India's voters have no access to any sort of news media.

And yet Indians are in some ways the world's most politically switched-on people. The official turnout figures (60% in the just-completed election, 62% in the one held just 19 months before) understate the case: if dead people and migrants were dropped from the electoral rolls, turnout would look much higher. The CSDS survey shows that half the voters were visited by a canvasser during the campaign and that a remarkable 22% attended an election meeting.

In a country where nearly a third of the people have not heard of the United States, a party like Janata Dal (United) can form up just weeks before the election, spring a new ballot symbol on the voters, and still capture 21% of the vote and a third of the seats in Bihar, the second-biggest state. Indians are capable of stunning feats of tactical voting, as in Uttar Pradesh, the biggest state. The opposition parties there were split, but managed nonetheless to chop the ruling party's strength in parliament by nearly half.

Indians think their votes matter; 63% of the respondents in the survey said their votes have an effect on the way the country is run. Faith in democracy seems to be strongest where conventional wisdom would least expect it to be. Dalits (ex-untouchables) are more likely to vote than upper-caste Indians; urbanites are much less inclined than country folk. Indians use their votes to demolish barriers to the advancement of their caste or community, to secure protection and patronage and, very often, to punish. Democracy is India's way of prosecuting the struggles V.S. Naipaul wrote about in his 1992 book, “India: A Million Mutinies Now”.

The outcome of the 1999 general election, a drawn-out affair that began on September 5th and ended on October 3rd, does not look much like a mutiny. India will have the same prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, as before. The outgoing coalition led by Mr Vajpayee's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), now 24 parties strong and rechristened the National Democratic Alliance, was re-elected with an expanded majority. It is the first time that a pre-poll alliance has won a clear majority in parliament since 1984, and the first time a prime minister has won back-to-back terms since 1971. The election looked like a ringing endorsement of the status quo.

Not quite. Just 281 of the 537 seats contested remained with the party that won the constituency in the election of 1998. Parties opposed to the BJP alliance took 88 of its seats away, and nearly half the alliance's seats came from its rivals. Although its majority rose, the share of the popular vote for its constituent parties dipped 1.5 percentage points. The mixed verdict sends several messages: the BJP's mandate is fuzzy and its victory depended on a large element of luck. The opposition Congress party, which got the lowest number of seats ever, is in slightly better electoral shape than the make-up of parliament suggests. The “third force” of parties aligned neither to Congress nor the BJP is not dead yet, though it will have little role to play in the current parliament.

At the same time, the 1999 election marks the BJP's coming of age. What was in the 1980s a party of city-dwelling upper castes mainly in the Hindi-speaking north has moved deep into new territory, social and geographic, most often through alliances but sometimes on its own. The BJP talks as if India were a single entity, but it understands that India's polity is a network of states in which castes, communities, classes and parties co-operate and compete for the benefits conferred by political power. The BJP wins because it surfs this web better than any other party. Yet, paradoxically, none is better placed to profit as globalisation and prosperity slowly homogenises the world's most diverse country.

A hung jury

It looked at first as if the 1999 election would break the pattern of the decade, in which national verdicts have been the sum of nearly independent verdicts in India's 25 states and seven territories. There were emotive national issues to vote on: India's victory in the “Kargil war”, in which Indian troops valiantly drove Pakistani intruders off mountain peaks in the disputed state of Kashmir. There was, in Mr Vajpayee, a leader of national stature who had demonstrated, as Indians saw it, something like heroism by driving out the Pakistanis. To a polity drunk on patriotism his chief rival, Sonia Gandhi, president of the Congress party, could look like a villainess, an Italian-born widow cynically exploiting her connection to the Nehru-Gandhi family to achieve supreme political power in a country that is not her own.

The CSDS survey shows that these themes did have some resonance. Nearly two-thirds (65%) knew of the skirmishes with Pakistan (compared with just 46% who knew about India's nuclear tests); but only 15% said the fighting had affected their vote. Mrs Gandhi's foreign origin offended roughly the same number of people. Mr Vajpayee was the most popular choice, though not an overwhelming one, for prime minister: 37% named him as their preference, compared with 27% for Mrs Gandhi. This election was indeed more “presidential” than recent ones. In 1996 47% did not name a preferred candidate; this year 16% demurred.

Yet the 1999 election did not yield a national verdict akin to that of 1984, when Rajiv Gandhi, Mrs Gandhi's late husband, rode into office on a wave of sympathy after the assassination of his mother, Indira. There were landslides in this election, but they were bounded within states, and several went against the BJP and its allies. The BJP and the Telegu Desam Party, a regional ally, won a big majority of seats in Andhra Pradesh, yet with another ally it lost in neighbouring Karnataka. The BJP combine swept Haryana (in the north) but, in another configuration, collapsed in neighbouring Punjab. Mr Vajpayee triumphed in Bihar but was humiliated in Uttar Pradesh, the BJP's heartland.

Divided loyalties

In most states where they mattered, the BJP's pet national issues seemed to be an excuse for people to vote as they were planning to anyway. In Haryana, 29% said Kargil had affected their vote; in next-door Punjab, slightly less than 15% did. The issue may have swung votes in a couple of states where Congress did less well than it had expected to: in Gujarat, where the BJP has been governing without distinction, 25% said they were influenced by it. Overall, though, the 1999 election was, like others this decade, a split decision by a 32-member jury.

Bombs and birth certificates would have availed the BJP little had it not exploited the two essentials of Indian politics: caste, the most decisive influence over the average voter, and the popularity (or lack of it) of state governments, which accounts for the biggest shifts. And the key to the chamber is alliances, in which like-minded parties back one another's candidates to avoid splitting the vote against a common rival.

Half the respondents to our survey agreed with the statement: “We should be loyal to our own region first and then to India.” Just 22% disagreed, a striking result in the wake of the fight with Pakistan. States are divided by language, except in the north, where several of India's most populous states share Hindi. That, along with varying social traditions and caste configurations, has given rise to a political system dominated by regional parties. Although Congress and the BJP are national in scope, 36 of the other 39 parties in parliament are confined mainly to one or two states. Most states have just a few important parties, often only two. Their elections usually produce clear mandates and governments that last their full five-year terms. It is the throng of states in the national parliament that produces India's political cacophony.

The BJP, a growing party once confined to the north, has had an easier time accepting this than Congress, a shrinking national one. Voters apparently have some sympathy with Congress's claim that only single-party government can give India stable rule. In our survey, 22% of respondents saw “nothing wrong” with coalition government and 25% are against it in all circumstances. But the compulsions of state politics overwhelm convictions about what should happen at the centre.

The BJP, which is more centre-minded than Congress, has no inhibitions about regional tie-ups. They have nothing to do with ideology (few of the 23 other parties in the National Democratic Alliance share the Hindu nationalism of the BJP). Nor have they much to do with overlapping interests among each party's constituency. In Bihar the BJP put together a winning coalition between upper castes and Dalits, who are at war with each other in some parts of the state. What matters most to the electoral success of an alliance is that it be on the right side of public opinion about the reigning state government. Thus the BJP and a regional party triumphed in Orissa against Congress, which leads an unpopular government. And the BJP's alliance in Karnataka bombed because its partner, the Janata Dal (United), was an unpopular incumbent.

Within states, the main unit of electoral account is caste. It is impossible to generalise about how caste affects voting, because the effect varies from caste to caste, election to election, and state to state. Both of Andhra Pradesh's main parties seek to mobilise voters from all social strata, yet traditional voting patterns persist: 70% of Reddys (a prosperous land-owning caste) voted for Congress, despite the landslide against; 90% of Kammas, a rival group of similar status, backed the Telegu Desam Party of the chief minister, Chandrababu Naidu, himself a Kamma. In other cases a sudden change of caste preference can help swing an election. In Rajasthan 70% of Jats, a small but influential group, contributed to Congress's victory in state elections late last year. After a squabble broke out with the new state government over job reservations for the group, 65% of the Jats voted this time for the BJP, which won the state by a narrow margin.

To many people there is something sinister or quaint about accidents of birth fixing political behaviour. Yet caste has ceased in most of India to be a hierarchy based on notions of ritual pollution and has become instead a vehicle for disadvantaged groups to press economic and social demands.

These can be as basic as protection (the rise of a party representing mainly Dalits curtailed violence against them in Uttar Pradesh, the biggest state) or as ambitious as reservations in government jobs, which were introduced in this decade in many states for lower castes (other than Dalits, which already had them). To be lower caste is an advantage in the public sector, which most Indians still regard as the surest path to the middle class. Caste politics do not fracture state boundaries. Caste-based parties rarely matter much beyond one state, even when the caste they represent does.

The BJP's strategy in Bihar, the second largest state, is a textbook example of how to braid caste, anti-incumbency and alliances into victory. The BJP and its 1998 ally, the Samata party, began with an edge: 30 of the state's seats in parliament against 23 for Laloo Prasad Yadav, the state's populist leader, who had an alliance with Congress. This year the Samata party, mainly representing other backward castes (OBCs), melded into the Janata Dal (United) and added a new face, Ram Vilas Paswan, a popular Dalit politician. He transformed the alliance's profile. Support among Dalits more than doubled from 16% last year to 33% in 1999, according to the CSDS survey. Its share of lower OBC voters jumped from 31% to 41%. The alliance rose to 40 seats. But Laloo's poor record did him no harm among his core supporters: his vote among Yadavs rose from 53% to 63% and among Muslims from 66% to 68%.

The new catch-all party?

The BJP may have won a less than overwhelming mandate, but it can claim to have won trust. Less than ten years ago it was almost a pariah party for its role in stirring up tensions between Hindus and Muslims, especially after the 1992 destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. Now few parties outside Congress and the communist parties will not consider it as an ally. Though it continues to depend more than others on the support of India's dominant northern males, it is attracting more lower castes, more country folk, more women, more southerners and (surprisingly enough) more Muslims than ever before.

Its expansion does not always mean shrouding its ideology, or deferring to allies. The BJP became the dominant party in Gujarat by joining, and then devouring, a vulnerable ally. It some day could do the same in Orissa, where the local partner has neither a strong ideology of its own nor a good organisation. The BJP's pro-Hindu bias can still be electorally useful, for example in Assam, which is anxious about an influx of Bangladeshi (Muslim) migrants.

In the longer term, the BJP is likely to prosper as more Indians come to resemble the well-off urbanites that are its most reliable supporters. According to CSDS data, for example, Dalits with more than ten years of education are more likely to vote for the BJP alliance than for any other grouping.

Congress seems to be heading in the opposite direction. Once a catch-all party that embraced the top and bottom of the social pyramid, it no longer knows who its natural supporters are. In states where its main opponent is the BJP itself, it is largely a lower-caste party. Where its main opposition is a regional party, its profile is mainly upper caste. Its vote base seems to be whatever the opposition leaves over. Yogendra Yadav of the CSDS compares Congress to a pillow, which retains the impression of whoever last sat on it.

There were glimmers of hope for Congress in this election (such as a 2.7 point rise in its share of the popular vote, most of it in Uttar Pradesh) and shades of doubt for the BJP. Still, it is hard to shake the impression that history is on the side of Mr Vajpayee and his thoroughly pragmatic crusaders.